The rising infrequency of quest completion

[pandapaul]

Seems like there are a lot of players these days who accept quests but not so many who complete them.

We used to be looking at an average of 2 quests completed per user for quite some time, but that has fallen. I wonder why, and I wonder what you guys think about it. I'm not spooked by it or worried or whatever, but I think it's worth thinking and talking about.

I think it's entirely possible that resolving #47 may help quite a bit. If folks accept quests and then simply cannot figure out how to complete them... that would make sense of the numbers. Certainly there's always going to be folks who accept quests then decide "meh. forget it." That's fine. But there seems to be a trend in that direction.

Anyway, here are a couple explicit questions for discussion:

• What things might cause players to accept quests and never complete them or abandon them?
• What improvements can we make to increase the frequency of quest completion?
• What other analytics or research could we do that would give us a better understanding of the player base and UX?

[frodare]

It might help to add a goals/badges system. That would give players something more to work towards than just the quest rewards. For example, we could get a special reward or recognition when completing 10 quests.

[zeriley]

Might be worth lowering the requirements (and rewards) for a month or two and see what that does to the numbers. Maybe they take too long to complete. Ideally, the quests would have a level of difficulty to complete and pick one hard one, two medium ones, and two easy ones. It's possible (I think) that a day's quests are all nether-related or somewhat rarer (like getting x number of rabbit's feet).